This Week's Tip

ORHub, Inc. (ORHB)

is a cloud-based software platform designed to transform the business of surgery into a value-based model. The platform empowers care providers at every stage of the surgical process to collaborate, organize, deliver, measure, and reimburse in one intuitive, easy-to-use program. This significantly decreases cost and improves outcomes by eliminating inefficiencies, duplications of effort, and errors and omissions that result from siloed processes in outdated software and poor handoffs from one part of the care process to another.

The need for ORHub is clear. Health care costs are out of control at more than 17% of US GDP, which equates to over $3 trillion per year. With costs rising every year due to an aging population and increasingly expensive treatments, providers are under severe pressure to become more efficient and reduce costs. This is happening because payors are aggressively reducing reimbursements and finally moving away from fee-for-service and toward a performance-based reimbursement system referred to as value-based health care.

Accurately measuring the cost of treating a condition and relating that cost to the patient’s outcome is at the heart of value-based health care. Institutions that have adopted this model have reaped savings of 20-40% on their overall cost of care. Unfortunately, today’s siloed IT systems are fundamentally at odds with this process. Legacy health care solutions come from a fee-for-service world and have reinforced the problem and produced a system with erratic quality and unsustainable costs. Most health care applications today are incremental improvements on these existing systems or are simple digital implementations of antiquated pen-and-paper processes.

Providers wanting to practice value-based health care need value-based software. ORHub creates a value-based solution that will revolutionize surgical care delivery by tracking the cost of treating a condition from diagnosis to discharge, and tracking outcomes that resulted from that treatment.

In an industry where major IT rollouts traditionally cost millions of dollars and take an average of eighteen months, pilot installations of ORHub have been completed in less than a month. By avoiding integration with legacy systems completely through a radically comprehensive and collaborative approach, providers see results right away. This approach produces real-time metrics in a uniform manner at any institution, which makes it ideal for large providers looking to make improvements across the board at multiple facilities.

ORHub started as a pilot program developed in cooperation with a major Southern California hospital. It has since expanded operations into a second facility at the number two non-profit hospital system in the US. Three additional pilot programs are scheduled prior to a national launch. The company has raised more than $1.6 million as of January 2017.

The company is also a showcase member of the startup program at Microsoft, which has been a key partner by providing financial assistance, strategy, introductions to influencers and mentors, and access to its sales organization who see ORHub as an exciting partner to expand the utilization of Microsoft Surface devices and Azure Cloud. Microsoft is funding a major case study in partnership with Intel about the impact of ORHub on participating institutions to be concluded sometime in Q2 2017.

ORHub’s leadership team is helmed by Colt Melby, who was appointed CEO in 2016 and has been crucial to developing and executing the company’s business strategy. Mr. Melby’s extensive business experience includes the NASDAQ uplisting of Smith and Wesson (now American Outdoor Brands), CUI Global Inc., and Quest Resource Holdings Corp. His wealth of information and relationships have been vital in helping the company go from concept to production in institutional medicine in less than a year.

Delivering surgical care to a single patient is a complex process that may take half a dozen companies and more than a dozen departments cooperating inside and outside the care facility. ORHub simplifies and streamlines this process by enabling vendors, providers, and surgeons to collaborate on providing care.